Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID) storage systems are being used to provide data storage for consumer and enterprise applications. Advantageously, the RAID systems can be configured to provide redundancy to the stored data so that should one or more (depending on the configuration) physical disk drives fail (or “degrade”), the data stored in the RAID system can be retrieved without loss of the stored data. The configuration of the RAID system is referred to as the “level” of the RAID system. For example, while a RAID-level 0 (referred to as a RAID-0 configuration) provides no redundancy, a RAID-level 1 (RAID-1) system uses data mirroring across two different physical disk drives to provide data redundancy. A different technique to providing data redundancy is a RAID-level 4 (RAID-4) system that has at least three disk drives and involves a block-interleaved, dedicated parity disk that allows for the data on a degraded disk to be reconstructed. There are other possible RAID system configurations, including combinations of RAID-levels; see U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/544,442, incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
As taught in the above-referenced patent application, a RAID system may be configured to implement one or more RAID-levels in accordance with a Virtual Array Profile (VAP). The RAID system is accessed using the VAP that defines a virtual array associated with the physical disk drives of the RAID system. This allows for the RAID system to be configurable as needed by a user. However, should the user desire to store the same data in RAID system using a different RAID configuration, e.g., providing additional data redundancy, the user must resend the same data to the RAID system configured using a different VAP. To do so might use so much extra system bandwidth that the RAID system no longer operates at a data rate needed by the user.